Heather Knits

Oliver’s mum asked me last year if I would make him a Christmas stocking, but unfortunately things were looking a bit frantic at the end of last year. This year however I have got my act together, and luckily Oliver is still young enough that hopefully he might not have noticed the absence of the stocking last year.

Here is the first side of his stocking:

And here the second:

The yarn used was Hobbycraft double knitting acrylic for the white, and Hayfield Bonus DK acrylic for the other colours. I found the Hobbycraft yarn a bit thin and am not sure I would use it again, but the Hayfield seemed more robust. I used 3mm needles even though this is a DK weight yarn so that the stocking would be firm enough not to stretch too much, and so that presents wouldn’t poke through. I also wove in the colour not in use every other stitch so there would not be long floats on the inside to get caught on little fingers or on the corners of presents.

It is now winging its way to its new owner and hopefully will reach there in time for Father Christmas to do his job

Last Christmas was my neice Jenny’s first Christmas, so I thought she had better have a Christmas stocking with her name on it, even if she was a bit young at 3 months to really understand.

Here is one side:

And here the other:

The snowflake is a traditional Scandinavian pattern:

The reindeer came from a free Drops pattern, but I’m afraid I can’t remember which one:

And the letters and the tree came out of my head:

Here it is full of presents (provided by her parents) on Christmas Eve after she had gone to bed.

The yarn is Cascade 220 which Annie and Mummy bought at Knitty City, Annie’s local yarn shop in New York, and I used 3mm needles. The yarn is an American worsted weight, which is a bit thicker than our DK weight, but thinner than our Aran weight, so the needles I used are very small for the thickness of yarn. This makes a nice firm fabric that will hold its shape hopefully through years of wear, and the presents wont poke out.

Things have been a bit quiet on the blog because I have been knitting like a maniac to get my Autumn in Anatolia jumper finished. I made it! and handed it in to Fiona to mark on Sunday. I shall now be catching up on everything I haven’t done over the last week or so, when it has been definitely knitting every minute that I could find to finish on time. I managed a row in the hairdresser, and a row at my Uncle and Auntie’s house when we went to see them last week. I am definitely getting better at time management though, because this time I had packed my bag and finished everything at 8pm the night before, rather than still printing charts at 5am like I was with my Keble Cardigan.

Anyway, back to the important stuff: here is the jumper:

And the back:

And another one of the front:

And lying flat:

As you can see the sleeves are looking a bit long because I had a moment of stupidity with the blocking. I laid it out on a towel and kept adjusting the shoulders to make sure they were even, not realising that I was stretching everything vertically. By the time I realised what I had done it had dried and there wasn’t enough time to wet and reblock. I will be doing that when it is back from marking.

Apart from that little hiccup I am very pleased and proud of it. I love the way the colours and patterns have come out and I think it is going to be very wearable. Although in typical fashion we are now having a week of warmish weather

The day before I headed off for Skip North I finally got to the point where I joined in the sleeves for Autumn in Anatolia. (feel free to imagine the dance of great achievement I am now doing)

I also ended up having a bit of a late night despite the next day’s early start because I wanted to knit at least 4 rows and make sure I hadn’t accidentally twisted one of the sleeves or anything similarly awful.

The sleeves are set-in style but I am knitting them in the round in one piece with the body (there was much calculating that went into that one!). After a week and a half of manic knitting I have now finished the decreases on the body for the bottom of the armhole, and am now back to only two pages of charts rather than the previous three, which was rather unwiedly. Although it does mean that I am now doing four decreases per round rather than the previous eight, so progress is slowing up a bit.

I put the underarm stitches for both the body and the sleeves onto holders initially, but was getting a bit worried that with all the taking it in and out of my knitting bag that the stitches were getting stretched. So on Sunday I had a big session and sewed in a lot of the loose ends from when I had changed colour, and also grafted the underarms. IN FAIRISLE! I can’t sufficiently convey how pleased I am that this has come out well. I am very proud. There was much jumping round the living room with glee.

I even showed it to Mummy on skype, but I think it is hard to appreciate the marvelousness with only a grainy webcam picture.

The graft is the final row of the stripes. I am hoping it will look a bit more even after I have blocked the whole jumper.

The cyclists did their biggest climb so far this tour, into Andorra, and I have crested my own little summit with my spinning.

I have finished my first full  bobbin of the tour. Yes, the grey Dorset is finally finished! Only two bobbins of the white to go and then I can ply it and see what it will be like as yarn.

In honour of the occaision I have been playing at making mosaics with Picasa 3. So here is a recap of my progress on this yarn on the tour.

And another, because if a thing is worth doing, it is worth overdoing.

I ran my foot over with our side gate shortly after taking these photos while having a quick tidy up outside. It is a nice substantial gate. I am hopping around now (well not right now, since even with the laptop I can’t type and hop at the same time). I shall go and bathe it and anoint it in a minute.

I have been managing to do a spot of knitting in between all the spinning. I have finally finished my latest test sample for my current City and Guilds project. I was test driving how the colours work, and also testing 6 possible patterns, of which I will probably use 3. This is the project I have been dyeing all the colours for.

This is it in its unblocked, straight off the needles state.

These are the most likely 3 patterns.

And these are the three probably rejects.

As you can see the edging at the bottom edge is too loose. I think the top edge is better but now probably a bit tight. I am reserving final judgement until after it has been washed. The top edging is worked on smaller needles, which I think works well, but I think I decreased too many stitches.

I also think I need to introduce another couple of intermediate colours. Another medium orange about half way up to ease the transition from red to orange, and a very pale orange just before the yellow. It is coming along though, and I am looking forward to being able to measure the tension after it has been washed and start plotting out the final design.

Like the rest of the UK we have had unaccustomed snowiness over the last few days. It started on Sunday night:

and by Monday looked like this:

This is definitely the most snow we have seen here since we moved in. Paul’s work had emailed and told everyone to work from home unless it was critical that they made it into the office so we put on our warm clothes and stayed indoors. At lunch time we went for a walk around the village to assess the situation.

The station was closed:

But there was some surprisingly industrious snow enginnering going on. Unfortunately I failed to photograph the large igloo in progress on the village green, but did photograph the snowman on the common (for reference Paul is about 6 feet tall – that is one tall snowman! Click the picture for the full effect).

It was very beautiful but a bit cold, so after a circuit of part of the common we came home and dried off and had hot chocolate

The snow is definitely on its way out now although I am surprised by how well it has lasted.

And now to justify the knitting blog part – well not actually knitting, but ingredients for knitting at least. I mentioned that I had been doing some more dyeing while my parents were visiting. Here are my latest efforts. They are for some more experimenting for my next City and Guilds project, which is coming along, although slowly.

I am very pleased with the oranges, they have come out pretty much as I planned. The green was a bit of an experiment. This is the first time I have had a go with Kemtex acid dyes, and this is their green. It is quite a bit bluer than I was expecting, and too blue for this project, though it is a lovely colour. I have also been playing with the acidity again (me, obsessive, heaven forbid!), and I made the solution for the green a little more acid than my last experiments. One of the reasons for this was the discovery that if you make up dye solutions and then leave them for 3 months, the less acidic ones go a bit mouldy (although they do still dye the yarn fine). However since the acid fixes the dye to the yarn, and the stronger the acid the faster the fixing (this means that the colours don’t run as far), in this case the colour has hardly had a chance to get onto the yarn before it is being fixed to it, resulting in the inside of the yarn if you unply it being considerably paler than the outside. It is an interesting effect, and makes the yarn look slightly heathered which is pretty, but I think I will reduce the acid next time and aim for a more solid colour.

For anyone interested in colour work who hasn’t seen this yet. Knit Lab have some very interesting stranded knitting designs available to buy. I have just bought the Experimental / Ornamental set which combine stranded knitting with increases and decreases to bend the pattern lines. I am looking forward to having a play with these.

It has been an exciting few weeks on the knitting front here, and I’m afraid I have suffered from the problem that when you are busy doing things the time to write about them just seems to disappear, or I am available but just too tired to make any sense. Anyway, things are a little quieter now (we wont mention the City and Guilds homework that I am still behind on) so I will do a spot of catching up. I am going to try and keep things in the order that they happened, otherwise I will be confused (it doesn’t take much).

I have been composing this post for some time (I told you I was a little slow) and was all ready to tell you all about the progress on my Kool Aid socks. They are becoming quite well travelled, although sometimes they don’t make it out of the bag. However, on Sunday I began to have worries about whether I would have enough yarn, and when I weighed what was left discovered that I had knitted exactly half of my ball. Unfortunately I am only half way down the foot of the first sock. Oh blast!

I haven’t been doing too well with these socks, since they are on their second incarnation already. Oh well, at least it gives me a chance to practice the cast on and a slightly different heel again. The Supercook socks use the same base yarn, but I used 2.5mm needles, and had plenty of yarn left over. I was slightly concerned that as it is quite a fine yarn I would get a more hard-wearing sock if I went down a needle size or two. So I started the Kool Aid socks on 2mm needles – I think that may have been a step too far. This time I think I will try 2.25mm needles. I haven’t actually undone them yet. I was concerned that I would undo them in a fit of pique and then think of something I should have measured which would be useful for the re-knit. I will bite the bullet soon.

Anyway, here is a picture of the sock disporting itself at the old alma mater before its untimely demise.

On a more chirpy note, my stitch samples for City and Guilds class were all fine, so I am inching my way slightly closer towards finishing. I have been playing with potential button holes, and think I have just about made a decision. Soon I will be on to the even trickier decision of buttons themselves.

On a completely un-related note, The case of the disappearing teaspoons: a longitudinal cohort study of the displacement of teaspoons in an Australian research institute gave me a good chortle today.

Apologies for no post on Monday, and that today’s post is rather later than usual. We have been down to Cornwall for a couple of weeks which was lovely, so the last three posts were brought to you by the magic of post-scheduling. However I haven’t been very quick at getting things sorted out once we got back, although we now have clean clothes which is a good thing.

September’s City and Guilds knitting homework was combined stitch structures. All of my examples come from the 1000 Knitting Patterns Book.

First up stranded knitting and lace, with a few slipped stitches thrown in too.

Next some cables and lace.

And finally some intarsia, a little bit of stranding and cables. The original pattern for this was in just one colour, and had a mixture of garter stitch and reverse stocking stitch for the background. I changed it to use all reverse stocking stitch and to introduce the colours. The rings are worked in intarsia, but the background is stranded across the back of each ring.

These were the last set of samples to complete the sample portfolio, and I handed in the whole lot (all 5 lever arch files of it!) at the class on Sunday. This is the first piece of work that I have had formally assessed for this course although Fiona has been checking our work as we go along to make sure we haven’t got completely the wrong end of the stick. It is nice to finally hand something in officially though, and I think it will be useful to have a bit of feedback on it all before I am too far along with all the other parts. It is always hard to know exactly what is expected on a new course until you get your first piece of work assessed. I am miles behind on the projects though so I had better go and get a move on with them!

Our homework for the June City and Guilds class was knitting with colour; stranding, weaving in, and intarsia.

My first sample was an example of stranding:

I did this one by knitting flat, then at the end of each row, snipping the yarn and, after zooming the stitches along to the other end of the circular needle, re-joining the yarn so that I could knit the next row, rather than purling back. The pattern is a traditional one, sometimes called Norwegian star I think. The yarns are all 4ply weight Shetland, apart from the darker blue which is an oddment and I think is probably acrylic, I’m not sure where it came from actually. I enjoyed knitting the pattern but didn’t enjoy the fact that this method meant it was hard to get the first and last stitches of each row neat and not sloppy. In light of this I worked all my other stranded samples circularly. It may be bizarre but I would rather do twice as much knitting and have it neat

With the stranding the yarn is just held loosely at the back of the work when it isn’t being knitted. Our next sample was weaving in, where the non-working yarn is woven into the working yarn every other stitch in the same way that you would weave in yarn ends.

As you can see, the yarn being woven tends to show through to the right side. This is particularly obvious if, like I have, you have used yarns which contrast a lot in lightness and darkness. This does allow you to make large blocks of one colour while still knitting in the round with relative ease.

Next up, Fiona gave us a traditional pattern, and using the same selection of colours inspired from a picture, we had to colour in the pattern in a variety of different ways. My picture is of tulip fields in Holland

It really shows how a pattern can look different depending on the contrast between the background and the foreground. Value contrast really makes a difference. It is one of the problems I found with a couple of my samples, that I had put orange against green, and although they are very different colours, the particular shades I had chosen were very close in value. So if you photocopied them in black and white they would come out the same shade of grey. This means that particularly from a distance the pattern is not clear, and just looks rather blurry.

Lastly we did a couple of samples of intarsia. The first geometric, so I used an argyle pattern.

The second pictorial.

They are supposed to be fish.

These were all very enjoyable to do, it has been a long time since I did any intarsia and apart from tangling the yarns a bit it was all good fun. I am definitely going to do some colour work for my second project for the City and Guilds – I just need to get a move on with the first one! Speaking of which, I don’t think I have mentioned this on the blog yet. I will take some pictures as it already has most of a body and one sleeve.